Fear of the blank page and other ongoing concerns...

Hello blog. Hello world. Hello handful of compassionate, kindly personages who read this as their good deed for the day/week/year...

It's been a while but let's not dwell on the past, let us look to the future...

...and the sword of Damocles which is the 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo threatening to crush me beneath the weight of failure.

Every October I consider whether or not NaNoWriMo is going to govern my existence for the following month and every year I succumb to its fiendish charms... Damn you NaNo, with your allure of domestic avoidance, ungoverned and wildly spirited words and the opportunity to put whatever I'm meant to be editing on hold and have a wild verbose affair with something exciting and new.

I normally love and equally curse you NaNo...
But... this year I am using you for my own ends; twisting you beneath the whip of my desires and I'm going to use your word count demands to crush my necessary novel re-write beneath your spreading chair bound arse! (Yes I said arse not ass... I know it sounds horribly English, but every time I write ass I feel like I'm doing a bad impression of an accent and implying I'm more hardass than I am... Damn...)

I realised about three months ago that the much ignored second draft of one of my first books no longer needed editing - it was way beyond that. I mean, it was kinda shapeless and its weight distribution was all over the place... if editing is cosmetic improvement then this draft needed to be taken to a lab powered by lightning, where my helpful assistant, (let's not say beautiful, he's kinda lumpen like the draft), Igor, would cut off every appendage and replace them with parts of better books. Levers would be thrown on a stormy night and "It's alive! IT'S ALIVE! WaaaHaaaHAAAHAAAARRR!" type thing would occur.

But rewrites are hard. And demoralising and they kinda make you feel like a teenager scuffing your Converse and groaning about it not being fair and but I've already done it once and why do you hate me so much! I wish I'd never written you in the first place!

*cough*

But it needs to be done.
So I'm trying to suck it up and get on with it and if I'm going to have to substantially rewrite this creature of mine, then I'm going to use one of the best motivation tools the internet and writing world has ever birthed and I'm going to have fun, (and alcohol and junk food and not shower or clean myself, the house, the cat or the husband), for thirty days whilst doing it!

YYYAAAAAAAARRRRRRRR! (Battle cry whilst holding a plastic sword in pajamas and over stimulated by tea).

So... she says looking sideways at the bloody misshaped manuscript lying wet on the operating/dinner table...

Wow, I'm really behind on Pretty Little Liars and it's kinda research and inspiring...
(Note to husband: please remove fuse from TV whilst out. x)

That's a lot of words...

It's November 26th, 1:25 as I write this and approximately fifteen minutes ago I hit 50,002 words in NaNoWriMo...

For a few days before the start of November I thought I would never have this moment, that there was no way on earth that I would be able to write 50,000 words in one month, even with a week and a half off at the start...

And now I'm here... Wow. This is a good place to be. There's Crabbies Ginger Ale, bakewell tarts and I ran round the house dancing and singing loudly to 30 Seconds To Mars and Florence And The Machine. I laughed, I cried, (seriously, I did. I think it's the relief and the knowledge that if I wanted to I could just stop right now...), I hugged my Halloween Hello Kitty, (Hello-ween Kitty?), because the cat's asleep on the radiator bed and when I asked her if I could hug her she gave me a look that implied it really wasn't going to happen...

And now?

Well, there's champagne in the fridge for midnight on the 1st of December and at least another 10-25,000 words left to write to finish this story and I have about four and a half days left...

Can I finish a whole novel in a month?

Let's see shall we.